He was struggling to focus, to pierce the tendrils of curling smoke that filled the dark room and the thin film of drying, darkening crimson that caked his eyelashes, casting a filter of blood-dimmed tide across his perceptions. To take stock of the situation before him and find the opening, the weak link in the chain, that tiny sliver of daylight that would somehow lead him though this and out to the other side.

"Slick," Charlie had said all those years ago, when they were first introduced. "What kind of stupid fucking name is that?" And he didn't answer - just grinned in that halfway grin he had, the one that made him look smart and dangerous in the way nice girls couldn't resist - and in that moment, he recognized that she understood: it was an honorific as much as a name, a testimonial to the powers of instinct. He had never been the fittest, but he'd always found a way to survive. "Like a cockroach, " Charlie had said, later, as things began to fall apart.

She'd been right, of course. And as he squinted and tried to bend light and see around the rippling wall of muscle and violent possibility that stood before him, he caught the faintest shift in shadows in a whisper of falling ash and then the heartbeat blaze - drawing deep, holding - of a cigarette flaring bright with oxygen and paper and tobacco stained with chemistry and then, behind it all, thin lips drawing back from a crippled rosetta of teeth and

Oh, no. Oh, dear sweet god, no.

And he blinked once, hard, and suddenly he could not shift his field of vision fast enough, away from what he'd seen and what it implied, and before he even had a chance to be crushed by the enormity of the knowledge that all the birds - the fierce raptors and drunken crows, mourning doves and all the simple pigeons who had fallen in the hours and years before - had come home to roost... he saw her. His weak heart leapt, and she leapt with it, moving across the room as the blood-dimmed tide turned to rose-colored glasses and despite himself, despite the terrible ache and sorrow of knowing what must come next, he felt happy to see her.

She was only a step or two away from him, eyes growing wide and mouth opening to form what he knew would be his name, when Aloysius' tree trunk of a left arm shot out and caught her by the hair and lifted her free of earth, gravity, reason.

Comments

[Jett]

....she understood: it was an honorific as much as a name, a testimonial to the powers of instinct. He had never been the fittest, but he'd always found a way to survive.

This is precisely what I was thinking when I named the character. Eerie and excellent, my man.

And the line about the birds made me pee myself a little. Good thing it's bath day.

[Jett]

...that is 'pee' in the delight sense, not in the (much more insulting) hilarity sense.

Hokay then.

[Palinode]

I'm starting to think those crazy kids are just never going to get together. On a different topic, I met a guy yesterday who is a dead ringer for Aloysius. What the hell, did we summon him, like some malignent Anton Chigurh?

[Susan (Trout Towers)]

That? Is gorgeous.

[ms picket to you]

Raptors and drunken crows? crippled rosetta of teeth?

I want to read this out loud; it's just... chewy with brilliant.

[foradifferentkindofgirl (fadkog)]

You are the awesome one. I appreciate you telling me, but it's you.